*** Kiara ***

  The world felt as if it had abruptly lit ablaze. Her skin itched. Her vision grew hazy. Noises were numbed as if her ears were filled with cotton. Her heartbeat unexpectedly throbbed loudly in her skull.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump. Thump-bump

  She closed her eyes and suddenly saw colors. Green, red, yellow, and blue, they swirled all around her. Consciously, she knew she was lying on the floor of her room. Unmoving and still. Yet she felt as if the whole room was moving around her.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump.

  She opened her eyes once more. The colorful swirls overlapped with her vision. She felt dizzy and somewhat motion sick.

  “Damn, why am I nearly certain I will have a hangover tomorrow?” she cursed her fate.

  Eyes closed once more. The colors burned through her eyes. They were not even signals received by her eyes. She knew that, but her mind interpreted them as such.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump. Thump-bump.

  “Time to fulfill your promise. You are not feeling well. You just want to curl up in a corner and weep until it is all over. But we are not doing that. We are stronger than that. So, get your act together! How did one of your favorite characters say it: The spear has no choice but to advance!” She tried to cheer herself up.

  The swirls of motion and color made no sense at all to her. Her whole body felt flushed with rampaging Mana. She started sweating. A moment later, she felt cold.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump. Thump-bump.

  She tried to reach out to her Mana source as she had done so many times before. All of a sudden, her body burned. Her chest felt like it was catapulted straight into the sun. She opened her mouth and screamed.

  White light flared behind her eyelids for an instant before she eased up on her Mana source and everything returned to normal, or at least her current normal. Her body started to convulse, and she puked on the floor beside her.

  “Damn, Sia you told me it would be bad, but this felt like it should be done in the presence of a medical professional, if not a whole team” she thought bitterly.

  The sweating got worse. All her clothes felt damp, and she didn’t even want to think about the fact that she was probably lying in her own vomit.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump. Thump-bump.

  Panic slowly started to creep up in her. Forcefully, she suppressed it. She tried to concentrate on her heartbeat, to calm down. Time was of the essence. She needed to concentrate. If she did not achieve her Mana sense right now, she would have to wait for seven years before she could be of any real use to anyone.

  Thump-bump. Calm down. Thump-bump. Breath in. Thump-bump. Breath out.

  “Where is that gods be damned tree? Fuck, you are fucking useless! I am going to snap you in two once this is over.” She needed to let her anger out and lash out at something. At the same time, she knew the tree was standing right beside her and had done nothing wrong.

  Another wave of dizziness. She wasn’t sure anymore if the tree stood to her left or her right.

  She opened her eyes for a second, barely anything more than a blink. The tree was to her right. She puked again and started to dry heave.

  She felt tired already, and it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two since she took the potion.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump.

  She concentrated again. With her eyes still closed, she looked in the direction of the tree. The swirls became even more fanatical and changed into a deep purple.

  “Why does a tree have purple Mana?” shot through her mind as an intrusive thought.

  She tried to empty her mind and meditate. To focus on only those Mana traces, directly before her. To ignore all the chaos all around her. Mana was not like light, and her Mana sensibility was not like her eyes. Signals she could not interpret were coming in from all around her and not just from where she was looking.

  Thump-bump. Thump-bump.

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  Time passed. She focused. She felt miserable, but pushed through.

  Still, no tree appeared in her mind. Just violent purple swirls. Changing all the time and never staying still for a single second. Her own body still felt filled to the brink with Mana, making her sick and making it hard to concentrate.

  Her attention shifted. She looked inside herself. Felt the large pool of mostly still Mana deep inside her. The wild Mana in the rest of her body or soul. Swirling around, seeking an escape. One is like the calm sea, and one is like a river rushing down a mountain. Throwing itself against the rocks time and time again, trying to break free and leave its shackles behind.

  She pressed her will against it. Forcing it to calm down or at least trying to. She felt the resistance. The remnants of a will, of a conscience of a beast, no of several beasts still remained in the volatile Mana revolting against her control.

  Kiara didn’t relent. At first, she ran the risk of the river pulling her along, of getting lost in it, surrendering herself to it, and simply letting go. She refused and pressed on. Under her will, the waves and rapids started to calm down.

  Some of the Mana started to seep into her Mana source, adding to the calmer Mana under her control.

  As the Mana calmed down, she started to feel better. The dizziness receded, and she started to breathe easier.

  She sat in front of the tree - her breathing was calm, and the sweating had stopped. Taking another attempt at making sense of the mess of purple swirls before her. After a while, she fell into a trance-like state, and yet her focus drifted inward once more. Drawn in by her own Mana source.

  She blinked and abruptly felt herself standing on a calm surface of water. In the distance, she felt a storm rage, but slowly losing intensity. The water was calm and mostly clear. Some darker traces swirled around in the otherwise crystal-clear water. She reached out with her mind, wanting to take a closer look. They felt wrong. Repulsive. Like a piece of trash on an otherwise clean, pristine, unpolluted beach.

  Without a second thought, she pressed her will against those traces. Demanding, no commanding them to disappear, to be gone. She felt her Mana source shrink, and a cold shiver ran through her body. However, as it passed, she felt lighter, better, and calmer.

  She meditated for some time, feeling the world around her slowly calm down as the storm slowly passed, before pulling herself back.

  As she arrived in her own body and directed her senses outward once more, she saw the tree brimming with Mana in her mind. Outlines of singular leaves, strong Mana pulsating inside them, and traces of Mana very slowly evaporating from them. Enveloping the whole tree in an aura of purplish Mana vapors. Thick Mana of a slightly darker, more blue or greenish color in nature traveled through the different branches and into the trunk. Remarkably, nearly no Mana was found in the bark or outer layers of the trunk. There was one clear channel of Mana through the trunk, fanning out to the roots. At the very base of the trunk, just below ground, was a little spiral of concentrated Mana.

  She spent her time studying the Mana structure of the tree in detail before letting her new Mana sense drift outwards in other directions. She immediately noticed the bright sun that was the nothingness orb hanging from her ceiling. The one time she touched it, it was the most concentrated Mana she had ever come into contact with. Her Mana sense tended to agree wholeheartedly. One might have just as well hang a little star in her room, given how bright it shone in her Mana sense.

  Layers and layers of glyphs and runes were woven over each other and connected with thousands of lines forming an intricate shell around a crystalline core. For the first time in her life, she saw a full crystal brimming with Mana. It was beautiful. She opened her eyes, and her Mana sense overlapped her normal vision perfectly.

  She looked over to cube number 15, her current nemesis. Slowly, she fed Mana into it, and immediately, the whole structure lit up. Whereas before she had tried to solve a puzzle box in complete darkness, with all the keys and components distributed throughout a labyrinth, she needed to feel her way forward. Now, there was light, and in mere minutes, she understood what she had to do. Her mind map of the cube was complete, and she could see the way she had to walk, but that did not mean she could complete the cube right now. To solve it, one needed to split its Mana into 6 separate strands of considerable length, leading them individually through the labyrinth of different connections and passing several resistors to activate the mechanism needed to unblock the main path. Most devious, there were several mechanisms situated inside the cube, which did not in fact help, making meaningless changes, and in one case, even locking a path to a necessary switch needed to complete the challenge.

  She took another look at the tree. Intending to thank it. She had been mean to it and maybe even had a little bit of a guilty conscience.

  It looked dimmer, less purple. The tree itself looked healthy. Sia had told her nothing about whether it needed special care. She had assumed it would be fine with one or two days without being watered.

  How did this tree survive in the wild? Small, brittle, and needed water every hour?

  She closed her eyes for a moment to think. However, her Mana sense did not comply with her wishes yet and remained pristine clear before her, but at the same time, so much less than it used to. Aiming her full focus on it she soon realized her world was shrinking. Not the literal world, of course, but how far she could see. The intensity of the sensation was also reduced. It was like someone was slowly turning on a dial and lowering the volume of Mana she could perceive.

  The damn tree was alright. It was just her Mana sense giving up on her. No, she refused to let go of it so easily!

  She directed her attention inwards. Her body was still filled to the brim with Mana, but the storm, the tossing river, had calmed down and barely moved anymore. It just sluggishly circled inside her. Feeling more like sticky honey than the pouring floods she had first experienced.

  Imposing her will to get it to move again proved pointless. The beasts which once inhabited the foreign Mana had lain down for their final rest and were not inclined to get back up.

  “No. No. No!” she shouted, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had been so close. She had seen the Magic of another world opening up to her, and yet the door had closed nearly all the way again before she had even realized.

  What else could she do? How could she keep the door from closing for good?